Alan Connor asks for your help in solving a sad mystery that started in Budapest in 1926
It is one of the strangest images you will see on the internet.
I happily grant you that the above claim is a bold, but have a look at this picture, out of the context for which it was created.
It is exactly what it appears to be. The background is a blandly composed, mildly irritating photograph of a pair of young models who are both of a catalogue level of attractiveness and who have never met before, wearing borrowed and studiedly casual clothes in an airy, dimly des-res condo with an ambience that suggests that it was used to shoot a commercial for something macrobiotic the day before, and as the set for a pornographic film the day after.
And the superimposed caption for this aspirational tableau is a condensed description of the death, 87 years ago, of an unhappy Hungarian waiter.
As I say, the combination leaves the strangest sensation in anyone who sees it. Why are the modern-day youngsters smiling? The wretched waiter, the caption explains, killed himself. It's not the kind of event that you expect to be illustrated by a smile, even the absent, stiff smiles in the image we're looking at.
There is more – though not a lot more. The waiter's suicide note was in the form of a crossword. Perhaps we're looking at a kind of horrible surprisedness: when you're confronted with something so bleak, the only response is a kind of wan smile?
Closer examination reveals a connection between text and image, albeit one that is literally hidden, almost occult.
At the stock images site Deposit Photos, the photo can be seen in its full insipidness. The young couple sits at a breakfast table, with a glass of orange juice, a biro and some paper. In the "keyword file" next to the snap are the words "crossword" and "puzzle". So while the photo does not depict a crossword, it has been filed in such a way as suggests that it might – so that is the connection to our dead Hungarian.
And the story of the waiter himself is the factual equivalent of a stock photo: slightly dodgy-looking, but available to all to reuse when space needs filling. It is a story that has appeared down the years in collections of factoids such as Richard B Manchester's Mammoth Book of Fascinating Information and Pustak Mahal's 501 Fascinating Facts.
While I was writing a book about crosswords, which should be out later this year, I came across this same depressing anecdote now and again, always with more or less the same phrasing. Here's a version from the Orlando Sentinel:
A waiter in Budapest who committed suicide left behind a crossword puzzle and a note that read: 'The solution will give you the exact reasons for my suicide and also the names of the persons interested.'
It's undeniably intriguing – the "names of the persons interested" gives it the flavour of a whodunnit. Indeed, following the crossword craze of the 20s, the detectives in many mystery stories found themselves confronted with clues in puzzle form.
But it has another flavour – "too intriguing to be true", perhaps. Who was this waiter? Why is there never any variation in the recounting? And isn't the Budapest of legend just the sort of city – where the sad citizens listen to Rezső Seress's Gloomy Sunday and drink laudanum – that would make the setting for an urban myth?
The lack of any further information in any of the books or newspapers I could find left me sceptical about the whole bad business – but then I didn't check any Hungarian newspaper archives. Happily, the good people at the Hungarian urban-myth site urbanlegends.hu were more sedulous, and Marinov Iván has apparently found, in old microfilm archives, a name for our waiter – Antal Gyula – and a location – Café Emke. So it seems to be true.
Two mysteries remain. First, the answer to the puzzle. Nick Pelling of the Cipher Mysteries site translates the contemporaneous story as reporting that the puzzle was "taken to police committee headquarters". But what was it? And could we use the crowd-sourcin', hive-mindin' power of the internet to finally solve this mystery?
As the centenary of the crossword approaches, it seems likely that we'll be hearing this tale a good few more times; it would be only proper if we could solve it before the anniversary on 21 December. Reader, can you help? Budapest police archives, do you still have the crossword on file? It is the least humanity can do for Antal Gyula after using his bleak life, one of debt and unemployment, as a fascinating factoid for so long.
The other mystery is back with that image. Here it is in context at BuzzFeed, the website that has picked up where those 501 Fascinating Facts books left off, classifying its collections under such non-Dewey-compliant categories as LOL, OMG and WTF.
And the question is: who made the smile/suicide image? Once you see it for what it is – a copyright-free text snippet and a stock image the use of which is covered by a blanket agreement, both containing the word "crossword" in their metadata – you can see how a computer might have assembled it according to some heartless algorithm. In which case, welcome to the future of news.
The alternative – that a human being took the time to put that copy on that image file, without noticing the spookiness of the result, or that the text covers where a crossword should be, or that there is no actual crossword in the image – is, appropriately perhaps, just too depressing to bear.